Angola's brutal history, and the MPLA's role in it, is a truth that we must tell. Britain's silence on Angola is deafening

 

Soldiers of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola in December 1975. 'I was convinced that the MPLA was a radical socialist movement that epitomised the heroism of African liberation'. Photograph: Popperfoto/UPH

 Angola's brutal history, and the MPLA's role in it, is a truth that we must tell

To ignore what happened to Angolans in the 1970s, in the name of leftwing discipline and unity, is a dangerous betrayal

Lara Pawson

The Guardian, Monday 5 May 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/05/angola-brutal-history-mpla-leftwing-discipline-betrayal

Over the centuries Europeans of various strains have tried to fulfil their fantasies in Africa. I should know because I'm one of them. Not that I have ever nursed urges to convert and conquer, trade and enslave, or paternalise, dominate and discriminate. But when I set off to Angola at the end of the summer of 1998 I was just one of many who had hoped to contribute to a socialist project on the continent.

I was convinced that, at its core, the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) was a radical socialist movement that epitomised the heroism of African liberation. I had been inspired by the writings of Basil Davidson and other British Marxists who left me in no doubt about the integrity of the MPLA under Agostinho Neto, the first president of independent Angola. Unlike its CIA-backed rivals – the National Front for the Liberation of Angola, and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita), the latter having allied with South Africa's white minority regime for the best part of two decades – I believed that the MPLA had fought for the freedom of all Angolan people regardless of their ethnic origin, place of birth or skin colour.

That said, I also knew that after the fall of the Berlin Wall the MPLA had made a political U-turn. Abandoning Marxism and Leninism, it had adopted a market-driven economics that morphed rapidly into crony capitalism. The power of the one-party state, which had endured since 1975 until flawed elections in 1992, was now concentrated in President José Eduardo dos Santos. Nevertheless, like many on the left my loathing was focused so intensely on Unita that it was easy to view the MPLA as little more than a cold war victim of US foreign policy.

When I arrived in Luanda, the MPLA had long been – and still is – a member of the Socialist International, an organisation that claims to pursue "progressive politics for a fairer world". I remember my pleasure on hearing politicians and other members of the urban elite calling each other camarada (comrade). Even the party rhetoric sounded remarkably similar to that of the revolutionary years of the 1970s. But a few months into my new job, when the country's "fourth war" finally erupted, I could no longer hide from the blindingly obvious: if revolutionary politicians were what I was after, I was at least 20 years too late.

In fact, this was also wrong. I began to discover that the idea of a 1970s MPLA heyday was just as misguided. An Angolan colleague told me about 27 May 1977, the day an MPLA faction rose up against the leadership, and the honeymoon of revolution crashed to a halt. Some called it an attempted coup, but my colleague insisted it was a demonstration that was met with a brutal overreaction.

Whichever story you believe, six senior members of the MPLA were killed that day by supporters of the uprising. In response, President Neto, the politburo and the state media made many highly inflammatory statements that incited extraordinary revenge. In the weeks and months that followed, thousands of people – possibly tens of thousands – were killed. Some of the executions were overseen by Cuban troops sent to Angola by Fidel Castro to repel a South African invasion.

I found this knowledge profoundly challenging. It turned everything I thought I knew on its head, especially when I began to understand that the 1977 purge cemented a culture of fear that has shaped a generation. How, I asked myself, had this appalling event remained so little known outside Angola?

The question began to obsess me. Back in London several years later, I started searching through my book collection for references to what Angolans refer to as the vinte e sete (the 27th). I found the odd sentence here and there; in one book, a few paragraphs. But what rattled me was that Angola-watchers on the left – intellectuals whom I admired – all seemed to have turned a blind eye to the thousands of killings. It was as if their commitment to the party was so deep that, in the end, they heard only the voices of its leaders and fell deaf to the calls from below.

Often I felt torn between my socialist beliefs and the search for truth. At one stage I became so disillusioned with the politics of revolution that I came close to giving up – on everything. But the words of an old friend, a man who was imprisoned and tortured by the MPLA in the 1970s, kept me going. "We cannot be afraid," he said. "We must write what we see and what we feel. Don't worry about what people will say … just get it down."

The dilemma of whether to tell the truth or keep stumm is hardly new. The European left has a history of toeing the party line – it is called discipline and unity – in the pursuit of freedom, equality and justice. The Spanish civil war is an obvious reference here, exemplified by George Orwell's account of his personal experiences with the Spanish communists in Homage to Catalonia. Let's not forget that Victor Gollancz, Orwell's publisher, refused to print it, "believing, as did many people on the left, that everything should be sacrificed in order to preserve a common front against the rise of fascism". Over the course of the past century the "sacrificed" range from the millions of victims of Stalin's brutality, via Cuban writers tiring of dictatorship, to female comrades in the Socialist Workers party seeking justice for alleged sexual abuse.

I know there will be some people who will insist, as the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze has, that "arguments from one's own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments". But in considering the case of Angola and the MPLA's record of brutality, it seems to me that privileging ideological theory over people's lived experiences, which are almost always contradictory, complicated and fuzzy, is far more dangerous. What many of us on the left have failed to see in Angola is that, for the majority, politics has always been about far more than merely a battle with the right.

Britain's silence on Angola is deafening

Despite meeting all the criteria for a great news story, the British media ignore this oil-rich state. I blame our colonial history

Lara Pawson

theguardian.com, Wednesday 27 November 2013 / http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/27/britain-angola-silence-british-media-colonial

What do Britain's journalists look for in a story from the African continent? How about a 71-year-old dictator who's presided over an oil-rich country for 34 years, lining his family's pockets with billions of dollars, and who extinguishes his opponents by torturing them to death and feeding their bodies to crocodiles? It's almost too good to be true – a cliche of the African state to have foreign correspondents drooling. But despite possessing all the ingredients of a thoroughly gripping news story, British media interest in Angola's contemporary political stage remains close to zero.

Today, in the Angolan capital of Luanda, a funeral will be held for 28-year-old Manuel de Carvalho, known as Ganga, who was allegedly shot dead by the presidential guard on Saturday morning. Ganga had been distributing leaflets about the killing of two former Angolan soldiers, António Alves Kamulingue and Isaías Sebastião Cassule, who were abducted in May 2012 while organising a demonstration for war veterans demanding payment of their pensions. Information leaked last week to the independent news website Club-K revealed that the two former soldiers had been tortured in police custody before being killed. One of them was then thrown to crocodiles.

Hours after Ganga's death, hundreds of Angolans took to Luanda's streets in a demonstration organised by the main opposition party, Unita, to demand justice for the deaths of Kamulingue and Cassule. In response, armed police, supported by reinforcements in helicopters, used tear gas to break up the protest. Hundreds of people were arrested and at least one was shot and injured.

Appalled by the authorities' repeated use of excessive force, this weekend saw many Angolans, both at home and abroad, expressing their anger and also their shame. One Angolan suggested that the abbreviated name of the MPLA ruling party (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola) should now stand for Matamos o Povo que tenta Lutar pela liberdade de Angola (We Kill the People who try to Fight for the freedom of Angola).

From London, I spread word of the day's events, emailing my networks and engaging in the online debates. Later on Saturday evening, at a private view at the Victoria Miro gallery in one of London's most exclusive neighbourhoods, I reflected on the links between Britain and Angola, and on the chasm that distinguishes the ease of my daily life from that of my friends in Luanda.

Disco Angola is an exhibition of six photographs by the Canadian artist Stan Douglas. Posing as the work of a 1970s photojournalist, Douglas's series of staged images juxtapose New York's disco scene with the moment when Angola swivelled from liberation war to civil war. In A Luta Continua, 1974, a slender woman in a green T-shirt and flares stands in front of a brick building painted with the MPLA flag and its motto, "A Luta Continua, Vitória é Certa" (The fight continues, victory is certain). Sipping champagne, I grimaced at this idea of the MPLA, which began its life as a movement for the liberation of the people. I also grimaced at myself, nibbling canapes in Mayfair while pondering the miserable events in Luanda.

Coincidentally, it was at the gallery that I learned of the BBC's Reporting Africa seminar, which took place on Monday this week. Also dubbed the "impartiality seminar", the chairman of the BBC Trust, Lord Patten, invited informed and interested parties to give their views on whether the BBC's coverage of Africa is "duly impartial and reflects the full range of views and voices".

I've long moaned about the BBC's idea of Africa, and the way its star presenters tackle stories coming out of the vast, complex continent. But in the case of Angola – one of Africa's most significant economic and military players – the failure of the BBC has little to do with impartiality. Currently, there is no BBC reporter based in Angola at all. Two years ago, "as a result of cuts", it also closed down the Portuguese for Africa department. I've given up asking why, however I'm certain that our colonial history and our very British attitude to language remain influential: "Portuguese, isn't it?". Of course, if Saturday's events in Luanda had taken place in Harare, we'd never hear the end of it – and questions of impartiality might become more pertinent. For the time being, if Lord Patten is serious, he should put aside a salary for an Angola-based reporter to live and work in the country: not because it's an African country, but because of what is happening to the people who live there and what this may mean for one of the world's longest-serving rulers.